1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a digital device and, in particular, to an improved error correction apparatus and method for a digital device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, a digital device, such as a mobile phone, MP3 player, and Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), incorporates various client modules such as a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) module and camera module.
Errors induced by electrostatic discharge (ESD) or noise may cause a client module to malfunction. For example, the LCD module may show a white screen caused by a signal error.
In order to prevent the client module from malfunctioning, a polling mechanism is used such that a host periodically polls a register of the client module. In the case of polling-based error correction mechanism, when an error has occurred, the functionality of the client module may be restored by specific user interaction.
In the polling-based error correction mechanism, a host periodically polls registers of its client modules for detecting an error with reference to the values of the registers, so the client modules can be protected or restored from errors.
In the case of error correction by user interaction, the user is required to interact with the device for restoring the functionality of the client module from an error. For example, when a white error screen is displayed at an LCD module, the error is corrected by cycling power to the LCD module (for example, by folding up and down a clamshell mobile phone or sliding up and down a sliding phone).
However, these conventional error correction methods have the following drawbacks.
In the case of polling-based error correction method, a host would poll the registers of the client modules, resulting in power consumption. Also, since the digital devices have timing dependent characteristics, polling may cause error correction delay and timing errors. For example, if a polling timing is off while the host polls a register of a contact detection module in order to detect an error that occurs during a game, the input signal would fail such that the new game score is lost.
In the case of user interaction-based error correction method, although the error correction may just be a trivial matter, however, it may cause inconvenience and when a specific code is repeated for a number of times, it results in reduction of lifespan of the client module. For example, whenever power to the LCD module is cycled for correcting the white error screen, the LCD module should repeat initialization process.